Abstract
Compositionality often presupposes a notion of opacity in that the combination of the meanings M and N of the subconstituents of a constituent C into the meaning of C must be blind to the inner structure of M and N. However, for cases where there is no direct 1-1 mapping between (surface) syntactic and semantic structure, opacity seems to be too strong a restriction on semantic construction. One could resolve this dilemma by basing semantic construction on another, not directly visible level of syntactic structure. But this strategy is not adopted by advocates of a surface-oriented syntactic structure such as the one in HPSG (Pollard and Sag, (1994). Head-driven phrase structure grammer. CSLI and university of Chicago Press). I will argue that the more relaxed notion of compositionality advocated in Egg (Mismatches at the syntax-semanties interface. In S. Müller (Ed.), Proceedings of the 11th international conferance on head driven phrase structure grammer (pp. 119–139). Stanford: CSLI Publications), which relinquishes opacity, allows semantic construction from the syntactic surface even if there is no direct 1-1 mapping between the two. As it allows a constituent to refer to only a part of its syntactic sister constituent, it extends straightforwardly to cases like John’s former car (Larson and Cho Nat Lang Semant 11:217–247, 2003), where the semantic contributions of its syntactic subconstituents are intertwined in the meaning of the whole expression in that this meaning looks schematically like m 1(n 1(m 2(n 2))), where M breaks down into m 1 and M 2, and N into n 1 and n 2, respectively.
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Egg, M. Against Opacity. Res on Lang and Comput 5, 435–455 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11168-007-9039-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11168-007-9039-x